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Daniel Kawcyznski MP apologises to Spectator contributor Melanie PhillipsI am glad to have this opportunity to respond to Melanie Phillips’s criticism of my involvement in the International Development Committee’s report on “The Humanitarian and Development Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” I’d like to apologise to her for my reaction and explain to her and her readers why I responded so passionately to her assertion, “shame on all of them.

The measures on ‘gas-guzzling’ cars, policing of wheelie bins and surcharges on plastic bags are based on scientific fads and, often, the government’s greed for taxpayers’ money, says Rod Liddle. The Third World won’t pay the price, and nor will big business — but we willFor one weekend each year every beach in this peaceful part of the world is taken over by gypsies, and the locals (and the handful of Western tourists) steer well clear and lock up their possessions, daughters, etc.

In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of good and evil. But it is in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov that Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression.

The genocide publicised by movie stars is over, says Justin Marozzi. What must now be resolved is a civil war with unlimited breakaway factions — and Hollywood cannot helpIt wasn’t the gleaming black helicopter parked on Second Avenue that raised eyebrows. New Yorkers barely blink at such a routine form of transport. No, passersby were more taken by the improbable banner hanging from its tail: ‘SEND ME TO DARFUR’.

Michael Prescott — who was a passenger on the King’s Cross train on 7/7 — applauds a movie inspired by the terrorist attacks. But why is nobody keen to distribute it?The world has an estimated 798 billionaires. Thousands more people are each worth hundreds of million. Any one of them is in a position to blow £8 million on a whim. Only one of them has decided to gamble that amount on a film about how Britain views its Muslims in the age of Islamist terror.

When I came to play back the recording of my recent interview with Bob Marshall-Andrews, the serially rebellious Labour MP for Medway, for a second or two my blood ran cold. As I remembered it, while I’d been drawing him we’d had a wide-ranging conversation about Blair, Brown, socialism, globalisation, MPs’ allowances, the constitution, the judiciary, the media and society at large. But instead of all that my tape started halfway through a long, rambling and very funny anecdote about a hotel where Marshall-Andrews had once stayed in Wales.